Running quickly down the inner slope of the levee, they yelled the warning to the nearest boat-load. “Levee’s going! Get out—get out and warn the others!” they shouted, running along close to the water’s edge, and as they ran they saw the warned ones turning tail and paddling like mad for the landward shore, spreading the warning as they went. But even so, the pair who had started the thing could not have covered the entire area if they hadn’t had the good luck to find a stranded canoe that had gotten away from its owner and drifted over to the levee shore of the flooded district.
“Here’s what we need!” gasped Larry, fairly falling into the treasure-trove canoe. “Grab that paddle and dig for it! There are more of the fellows up there among those shacks just ahead!”
As he spoke, a row-boat, loaded to the gunwales with refugees and their dunnage and pulled by Welborn and another of the Aggies, came through an opening between two of the houses. Welborn and his partner had already got the warning and were hurrying for all they were worth, but they backed water long enough to shout to the two in the canoe.
“All out but a couple o’ the fellows over in that farther house. Their canoe’s stove. We hadn’t room for ’em: go get ’em!”
At the word, Larry and Dick dipped the paddles and sent their light craft spinning toward the outlying house, a story-and-a-half frame with the water already lapping over the window sills on the main floor. Approaching it from the rear, they saw no signs of the marooned ones. As they backed water at the kitchen door another rumbling slump and a splash told them that more of the levee had been carried away by the river. Their time was frightfully short, and they knew it.
“I don’t hear ’em—they must be around in front,” Dick jerked out; but when they essayed to paddle around the house they found the way blocked by a chicken-wire fence. And the precious seconds of time were racing.
Balked by the fence, they quickly handed the canoe back to the rear entrance, and tying it to a porch post, jumped out to wade through the open door into the kitchen. There was no light save that which came from the distant bonfires, and this was partly cut off by the half-drawn window shades. The water was over knee-deep on the house floor, and Dick stumbled over a floating chair.
“Queer we don’t see or hear anything of ’em,” he said. Then: “Maybe they’re up-stairs—sure, that’s where they’d be, trying to flag somebody from the windows on the street. I believe that’s them you can hear yelling right now.”
The answer to that suggestion, of course, was to try to find the way to the upper story, and to do it swiftly. Larry laid hold of the knob of the first door that he came to, hauled it open against the impending drag of the flood, and plunged blindly ahead, with Dick at his heels. At the first step both of them lost their footing and found themselves floundering in utter darkness and in water over their heads. In his haste and excitement Larry had opened the door leading to the cellar.